Expository Times, Dec 2002
Many years ago, when I was an assistant minister in St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, I used to conduct the annual Battle of Britain service in September because the minister then always took his holidays during September. So each year on Battle of Britain Sunday I would announce the hymns and lead the prayers but someone with wartime experience of chaplaincy in the RAF was always invited to preach. After the service there was always an extremely pleasant buffet lunch at a nearby RAF station. After I had conducted the fourth service an RAF officer, his uniform covered in braid and his chest dangling with medals bore down on me at the lunch. He explained that he had been at the service for the past four years, heard me take part but never preach. "Why don't you preach to us?" he boomed. I smiled and said I would find that difficult since the Battle of Britain took place before I was born. He gave me a very quizzical look and, as he stalked away, said "You're in trouble come Christmas!"
Two years ago, I was producing for television a nativity place acted by adults in and around a barn in Fife. We planned to record over two evenings, and the night before the first recording there was a complete run-through of the event, with real shepherds and real sheep, three kings on horses (camels are in short supply in Fife), a beautiful Mary and a nervous Joseph and the farm donkey. The play's director, imported from Edinburgh and all too aware that her Edinburgh clothes and shoes were less than suitable for farmyard amateur dramatics, was watching the scene in the stable develop with the beautiful baby who had been loaned for the evening. Suddenly the donkey did what occasionally donkeys need to do. I turned to the director and said "I hope the donkey does that tomorrow night, when the cameras are rolling". She answered briskly. "I hope not, and if it does, you're cleaning it up"
But it is the person who who wants the stable neat and clean who is obscuring the God who did not come to a sanitised stable or a hygienic world, inoculated against the effects of barnyard filth
However since that night I have reflected that whatever the donkey did for authenticity its presence was hardly a reflection of the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus which make no mention of donkeys. It's reasonable to assume, I suppose, that if Mary and Joseph did make the journey to Bethlehem, a donkey would have been the natural means of transport for the pregnant girl. Or it's perfectly plausible that an inn which would require constant supplies both of water and flour would keep a donkey to convey them from well and field.
One of my closest friends, the Roman Catholic priest and scholar John Fitzsimmons likes to say that however plausible it is to imagine a donkey in the stable looking for a reason for the donkey's presence misses the point. Because, he says, "this is a theological donkey". And he points quite rightly to the verses at the opening of Isaiah: "The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand."
As he stands there in the nativity scene, the donkey strikes two inseparable notes, echoing Isaiah's theme. The donkey knows its master's crib: that's a note of tenderness and intimacy pointing to the inextinguishable love of God see in Jesus. But there is, too, the note of severe criticism. My people do not know or understand. The two are inseparable because God's love without any judgment is just sentimentality, and God's judgment without his love is always condemnation.
On the night of the recordings the rain poured down, the huge crane which was to light the scene could not be driven through the mud but a brilliant lighting director managed to cope. Hesitant shepherds suddenly managed to find natural conversation to ad lib their way through the script. The donkey behaved itself and the baby cried and cried and cried, which despite the sentimentality of the tearless baby away in a manger, was as it should be. A couple of weeks later the real performances for real audiences were staged and in the course of a week thousands of people watched and listened and sang.
And they return a few months later because the farm is the scene not just for a nativity play but a passion play too. Which is as it should be too.